Armistice Day … the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month … when major combat ceased on the western front (fighting continued on other fronts). Armistice Day was officially amended in the USA to Veteran’s Day in 1954 to honor all those who had served: To those of you — especially my Dad — that served, thank you for your service.
Fear and Cold War Culture
From Awaiting Armageddon:
U.S. paralysis on civil defense could be credited to an inability to face the prospect of nuclear war or simply to a sense of futility. … Intellectually, Americans knew the hazards of nuclear war, but America was not ready [during the Cuban Missile Crisis] … The United States simply had refused to accept that war might erase or, at the very least, devastate the future. As a result, civil defense was kept on a back burner, partially because the nation’s leaders failed to tell the public the truth — that the United States had little means of protecting its citizens from total war. This disconnection in the American psyche — an inability to face the loss of the future that could result from rabid anti – Communism — left the nation vulnerable to war and to false claims of safety. Cold War culture taught Americans to fear, but it did not offer a refuge from the deadliest threat, nuclear attack (61).
From “When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction:”
In November 1983 a routine NATO nuclear readiness exercise code-named Able Archer could have led to a Soviet nuclear strike against the West. What is remarkable about this possible Soviet strike is that it was perceived by the Soviets as a defensive and pre — emptive strike. Therefore, the Soviets somehow believed that there was an impending Western nuclear attack that they had to pre — empt. American rearmament, NATO missile deployment, and Reaganite rhetoric somehow convinced the Soviets that the nuclear endgame was near. These fears climaxed in November 1983 during a seemingly innocuous nuclear-readiness exercise by the West. It has been described by historian Christopher Andrew as one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War.
How many other such “moments” exist?
Public and Private
I am participating in a panel discussion on “The Public and Private in Media” as a part of an art exhibition: The New Normal. The New Normal examines the issue of private information becoming less private in our technological society. Regardless of how well I present/discuss today, this exhibition has made me reexamine my ideas of the private as increasingly public beyond that of identity theft and and the Patriot Act to include that of the culture of privacy surrounding humanities research. This is a topic that I have struggled with: expressing my thoughts in an open forum via a blog and the “publishing” of my research library via Zotero (see this post by Mark Sample for a thoughtful reflection on publishing your Zotero library).
I choose to publish a blog and my research — to make the private public – for two reasons. First, an online identity is fast becoming a prerequiste in the academic world, and while it may be one that is not necessarily our choice or under our control we can make it our choice and control it by doing. Second, as Cameron Blevins and Mark Sample have effectively argued, making one’s thoughts and research public offers scholars a new, important, and powerful way to collaborate and contribute to humanist scholarship at a greater level that ultimately makes one’s own work as well as that of other scholars better. The kicker, however, is that while I control — choose — the dissemination initially, what happens to the private made public may quickly leave my hands. The question is, then, is this necessarily a “bad” thing (maybe despite using a Creative Commons license)? The essays by Michael Connor (curator of The New Normal), Marisa Olson, and Clay Shirky, I think, point out that the private made public is not necessarily bad or good only that the individual must become evermore aware and proactive in managing the private/public (Skirky’s idea of the “opt-in, opt-out, don’t ask”?). This is not to suggest that there are not “bad” aspects; one need only have followed the controversy over Facebook’s Term of Service (also see this short Flash presentation), let alone the issues surrounding the Patriot Act. Nonetheless, I think the issue of the private made public as contained and examined in The New Normal is examined as a complicated issue that is as much grey as it is black and white, and that, ultimately, the issue becomes one of choice, of control and when we have control over the private made public and when we do not.
I must admit that I feel that I will be out of my league during the panel discussion, that I have not had enough time to internalize the material and the idea of the way in which the private is becoming increasingly more public. I do, however, know that my participation, the airing of my private thoughts in a public space even if incomplete about the private and the public is good: good for furthering collaboration; what I can learn from the other panelists and the audience; for furthering my own work in the digital humanities; and understanding the issue of the private and the public as it relates to one of my digital projects, the Oral History Catalogue.
the Stream: Skimming and Boring
In response to my last post on “the Stream,” Cameron Blevins (History-ing.org) pointed out that one “issue with the stream is the seemingly eternal one of breadth vs. depth,” and that one of the “biggest” challenges for a user was the “transition from horizontal skimming to vertical boring down” into the stream. I agree with Cameron that transitioning from one level to the other is a fundamental skill and a challenge to learn and practice. I do, however, believe that these are skill sets humanists already use/practice to a greater (or lesser) extent. I had to develop both skills, especially the skimming technique, for history grad seminars: 1 monograph (+ any needed supplementary material) / class / week @ 2 — 3 classes / semester. In fact, I am still developing these skills as I prep for quals this spring.
The deep drilling is, I would agree, the hardest to negotiate. The question, at least for me, is how digital tools may help us with deep boring the ever-thickening data stream — particularly with respect to the point Dr. Cohen made in “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History”1 about research and drilling deep in a research project. What the tools are/is/will be is an open question, at least for me.
I think that the API Workshop hosted by NiCHE looks very promising in helping the digital humanist find and/or create such tools:
Historians and other humanists now have access to digital primary and secondary sources on an unprecedented scale, but almost all of these resources are delivered through web browsers with the assumption that a person will be plodding through them one at at time. What we need now are ways to make these sources readily available to computer programs: intelligent agents, machine learners, adaptive filters, data mining packages, you name it. We need to be able to recombine information from multiple sources in a way that supports the discovery of new information. And we need to provide tools that allow networked collectives to work together and leverage the power and diversity of the individuals that comprise the group.
Our ability to tap the stream, whether on a horizontal or vertical level, as Cameron noted, is the one area “that has the greatest potential for real advancement, especially in the digital humanities.” Our skim v. bore skill set honed in seminars, quals, and research in general gives us (I think) a unique perspective in developing or realigning existing digital tools to address this issue.
What are your thoughts on this issue? What other issues exist for the humanist with respect to the real – time stream? What are the tools that exist or should exist for — especially deep boring — mining this stream?
1 Cohen, Daniel J., Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, and William J. Turkel. “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History 95(2): 452 – 491. Note: You must access this reading via your Library.
the Stream
I spent yesterday trying to catch up on my feeds and found my reading taking me down the “stream.” Here are some links to yesterdays discoveries:
- The Evolution of Blogging
- How Internet Content Distribution & Discovery Are Changing
- Why Blogs Need to be Social
- Distribution… now
- Dimensionalizing the web
- Welcome to the Stream: The Next Phase of the Web
- Mining The Thought Stream
- Towards a Programmable Web
What relationship/role/understanding/use of the stream should the digital humanist develop?
On Blogging
I have wanted to blog for some time, but I have not had the courage to do so, at least until now. I have had a RSS reader for several years now (make that 6 years) and have followed many in the web standards and digital humanities spheres. I think fear was the biggest stumbling block for me, fear of judgement, etc. However, this year I asked my digital humanities students to blog. I could not in good faith require my students to blog if I did not blog myself. Thus, I bit the proverbial bullet and added a blog to my site. So far, I am finding it a rather enjoyable experience (though one I have not had much time to do).
Many of the students in my class have also found that blogging was not something they had considered before, but are now finding their blog an intriguing addition to their work as scholars (as well as anxiety producing one): What to Write, Entering the Blogging World, Posting, and Coming to Terms with Blogging. In addition to these posts, Cameron Blevins recently made some very good points about blogging as an important part of his intellectual and community building experience within academia and digital humanities in particular.
Only time (and good posts) will tell if I, too, find blogging helpful in connecting me to a wider world. Ultimately, I hope that the students from my class find blogging as good a tool as Cameron does in building intellectual and community connections within their own respective spheres as well as outside those spheres. So far, it appears that they are finding it so.
HTML: the Gateway Drug to Digital Humanities
This is the first post in a series about the role of html and css in the digital humanities.
As I was finishing up a lesson on html and css for class today, I was, again, struck by the thought that html and css are primarily geared, it seems to me, around creating a digital edition. This is, of course, a necessary thing, but is it really digital humanities? Does teaching html/css come at the expense of other languages and skill-sets that are better suited and important in the digital humanities. I am and am not sure.
Ultimately, html’s place in the pantheon of digital humanities skill-sets/languages is assured, but are the students missing out on other more important aspects of digital humanities? Or, as I am now beginning to think, are html and css the gateway drugs to the wider world of digital humanities skill-sets and languages that might make one a “digital humanists”? Could there be others as significant, if not more significant, in making one a digital humanists (if there really is such a thing)? Any thoughts, suggestions? For or against?
Graphic and Web Design
Digital humanities is about many things: the infinite archive, programming, markup, style, knowledge production, collaboration, and graphic design. I believe that graphic design is a key element in understanding and doing digital humanities because design is a core part of our modern experience as citizens and as humanists. Understanding the elements of design, from color to typography, is an important skill for digital humanists to acquire. Of course doing so requires us to become familiar with the elements of design. One of the best ways to do so is to view good design.
One of the best graphic designers I know as well as a good friend is Hiller Higman. Hiller’s work is unique and original, but his work is also (so it seems to me) derived from the the everyday world around us, both related and unrelated to design, as is our own work as humanist scholars. How we view the world around us and our humanist scholarship through design can teach us something about how digital tools are shaping the very act of doing humanist scholarship. Exactly how is a question I do not necessarily (yet) have an answer to, but I believe that it is true. I hope that during the Humanities 340, we can come to an answer or maybe better yet, develop a better question to ask about the relationship between humanist scholarship and design.
For the time being … take a moment to view Hiller’s portfolio—NBC, Bridger, Web—in addition to his inspiration blog @ Northside #3.
(Shameless plug: if you are looking for a graphic designer look no further than Bootleg Enterprise . I need say no more, his work stands on its own.)
Hello World
Hello World. The first official post from Richard @ goatrock Research.
